Microsoft’s new Windows 10 operating system is immensely popular, with 14 million downloads in just two days. The price of the free upgrade may just be your privacy, though, as changing Windows 10’s intrusive default settings is difficult.

While the upgrade is currently free of charge to owners of licensed copies of Windows 8 and Windows 7, it does come at a price. Several tech bloggers have warned that the privacy settings in the operating system are invasive by default, and that changing them involves over a dozen different screens and an external website.

Here's another article regarding our intrepid heroes at MicroSoft on how to change settings:

Lots of new spyware, keyloggers, data miners are incorporated into the software by default. Only the gods of cyberspace know what else there may be. Perhaps some apps are in order. Listing fixes and settings for users would be a good idea.
With that in mind, here's a nice video on changing the default settings in the new windows 10.

As reported by Wayne Williams at Betanews and confirmed by us, a simple registry hack to a Windows XP system tricks Windows Update into providing updates for it.
Williams says that the hack, included just below, makes the system look like Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 which will continue to receive updated until April 9, 2019.

Windows 10 has a reputation for “phoning home” more often than its predecessors, and while that’s primarily true, much of this was already present in Windows 8—and an awful lot of it is present in other products like Android, iOS, and Chrome.

That’s not to say all of those settings are good, just that there’s very little new happening here.

You can read the privacy statement for Windows 10 here. It’s not quite as sweeping as the Windows Insider Preview policy that caused so much commotion, but it’s still very broad (as most privacy policies are).

Plenty of sites have published lists of all the features you should turn off in Windows 10 to protect your privacy, but many don’t explain in detail what each of these settings do, which makes it hard to separate FUD from fact. So let’s go through those settings and explain what we know about them, where the real problems are, and how to turn everything off.